What does dependency reveal about human learning? All humans are dependent, largely because we are variously vulnerable and disabled at more than one stage in our lives. In this paper the subject of dependency is approached largely in the context of our vulnerable and disabled states, including in particular, states of profound disability. The primary contention is that our dependent states should feature in accounts of how we learn, and of relations between learner and teacher, in ways that compare with (...) the attention given to personal autonomy and independence. (shrink)

_Phenomenological insights into health issues relating to bodily self-experience, normality and deviance, self-alienation, and objectification._.

"Analyzes the value of using case-based methodologies to address contemporary social justice issues in philosophy"--.

Healthism and ableism intertwine through an imperative of normalcy and the ensuing devaluing of those who fail to meet societally dominant norms and expectations around “normal” health. This paper tracks the effect of that imperative of normalcy through current research into gut microbiome therapies, using therapies targeting fatness and autism as examples. The complexity of the gut microbiome ought to encourage us to rethink our conception of ourselves and our embeddedness in the world; instead, the microbiome is transformed into one (...) more tool for controlling unruly bodies and minds. (shrink)

The literature on epistemic injustice has been helpful for highlighting some of the epistemic harms that have long troubled those working in area studies that concern oppressed populations. Nonetheless, a good deal of this literature is oriented toward those in a position to perpetrate injustices, rather than those who historically have been harmed by them. This orientation, I argue, is ill-suited to the work of epistemic decolonization. In this essay, I call and hold attention to the epistemic interests of those (...) who are epistemically marginalized on account of relations of dominance and oppression. To do so, I draw on Kristie Dotson’s work, which uses a systems approach focused on epistemic agency. I develop Dotson’s insights further to argue that epistemic inclusions may be just as pernicious as epistemic exclusions Specifically, I highlight some of the ways in which epistemic agents can be included in epistemic systems in a manner that is epistemically exploitative—extracting epistemic labor coercively or in ways that are distinctly non-reciprocal. I then turn to María Lugones’ distinction between horizontal and vertical practices to discuss avenues of resisting both exclusions and inclusions that thwart the epistemic agency of marginalized knowers. (shrink)

Much work in care ethics and disability studies is concerned with the flourishing of human animals as an independent species. As a result, it focuses on how the built environments and the social structures that produce them restrict and exclude us. This paper addresses this problem and provides tentative first steps towards sketching an account of ethics that is structured around the interdependent nature of human and more than human life. I argue that our embodied existence places us in a (...) shared condition of vulnerability with all forms of life on earth. This allows us to conceive of caring as an essential condition of the sustainability and well-being of social and ecological life systems. To this end, I discuss the notion of anthropocentrism – and the attendant notion of Anthropocene – and argue that the conception of human animality that underwrites it posits a disembodied and homogenous ‘anthropos’ that is equally responsible for and equally affected by unsustainable social systems. Further, I examine the debate that opposes realist and constructivist accounts of nature, and I argue that it is inadequate to look at nature through the lenses of the predatory social systems that are responsible for ecological injustices in the first place. (shrink)

: Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and "cure" of disabilities.

Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and “cure” of disabilities.

Advances in prosthetic design should benefit people with limb difference. But empirical evidence demonstrates a lack of uptake of prosthetics among those with limb difference, including of advanced designs. Non-use is often framed as a problem of prosthetic design or a user’s response to prosthetics. Few studies investigate user experience and preferences, and those that do tend to address satisfaction or dissatisfaction with functional aspects of particular designs. This results in limited data to improve designs and, we argue, this is (...) pragmatically and ethically problematic. This paper presents results of a survey we conducted in 2017 with people with upper limb difference in Australia. The survey sought to further knowledge about preferences surrounding prosthetics and understanding of how preferences relate to user experience, perspective, and context. Survey responses demonstrated variety in the uptake, use and type of prosthetic—and that use of, preferences about, and impacts of prosthetics rely not just on design factors but on various contextual factors bearing on identity and social understandings of disability and prosthetic use. From these results, we argue that non-use of prosthetics could be usefully reframed as an issue of understanding how prosthetics can best support users’ autonomy. This supports the claim that there is a need to incorporate user engagement into design processes for prosthetic limbs, though further work is needed on methods for doing so. (shrink)

This article suggests increased attention to how medical discourses of gastrointestinal (GI) disorder and distress are fraught with social assumptions and consequences by examining nineteenth-century and contemporary medical texts focused on chronic constipation and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). I suggest that these medical discourses present what I call the “gastrointestinal woman,” who is characterized as having unjustified anxiety and is to blame for her condition. My approach to understanding, and ultimately revising, the representation of the gastrointestinal woman is shaped by (...) disability studies scholarship, which encourages intervention in problematic medical discourses and more active shaping of discourses of chronic pain and illness by those who have these conditions. (shrink)

In October of 2014, news outlets began reporting on a case of a lesbian couple suing a sperm bank for receiving the wrong donor's sperm.1 As the lawsuit Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank alleged, not only did the couple receive the wrong donor's sperm but they had specifically chosen a white donor with blonde hair and blue eyes and the sperm they received had been from a black donor.2 Both women were white. The couple gave birth to a black/mixed-race child (...) in 2012 and claimed that their daughter's race posed particular challenges for their family, from facing prejudice in their nearly all white community to difficulties dealing with their daughter's hair. The couple sued for "wrongful birth" and "breach of warranty,"... (shrink)

: This paper argues that ecofeminism can consolidate its tradition of elucidating the interconnections between different oppressions by expanding upon its philosophy of the body. By looking at the ways in which particular bodies become 'marked', and so devalued, ecofeminism can point towards various unexpected and creative coalitions. Here I concentrate especially upon two intertwined sets of markings, namely those related to aesthetic discourses and those related to discourses of Western reason. I argue that both of these ultimately revolve around (...) notions of control of the body as being constitutive of Western ideas of human identity. Moreover, I want to affirm that those ideas which encourage us to devalue certain bodies stem from discourses related to nature and animality. Through considering how ecofeminism might re-think embodiment, I argue for an alternative conception which stresses the inherent vulnerability and agency of human embodiment. (shrink)

While fetal surgery—and pregnancy termination as a possible therapeutic alternative—have been examined in a number of studies, very few have addressed the issues and tensions that arise when prenat...

In this paper I argue that a global bioethicsis possible. Specifically, I present the viewthat there are within feminist approaches tobioethics some conceptual and methodologicaltools necessary to forge a bioethics thatembraces the health-related concerns of bothdeveloping and developed nations equally. Tosupport my argument I discuss some of thechallenges that have historically confrontedfeminists. If feminists accept the idea thatwomen are entirely the same, then feministspresent as fact the fiction of the essential``Woman.'' Not only does ``Woman'' not exist,``she'' obscures important racial, ethnic,cultural, (...) and class differences among women. However, if feminists stress women'sdifferences too much, feminists lose the powerto speak coherently and cogently about genderjustice, women's rights, and sexual equality ingeneral. Analyzing the ways in which the ideaof difference as well as the idea of samenesshave led feminists astray, I ask whether it ispossible to avoid the Scylla of absolutism(imperialism, colonialism, hegemony) on the onehand and the Charybdis of relativism(postmodernism, fragmentation, Balkanization)on the other. Finally, after reflecting uponthe work of Uma Narayan, Susan Muller Okin, andMartha Nussbaum, I conclude that there is a wayout of this ethical bind. By focusing onwomen's, children's, and men's common humanneeds, it is possible to lay thefoundation for a just and caring globalbioethics. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are reasons to believe that there is no single concept or category which demarcates all individuals who have a disability from those individuals who do not. The paper begins by describing that I call ‘a Unified Concept View of Disability’ and the role that such a view plays in debates about the nature of disability. After considering reasons to think that our concept of disability is not unified in the way that the Unified Concept View (...) assumes, I outline what a non-unified approach to disability might look like. The paper concludes by considering implications of rejecting the Unified Concept View of disability. (shrink)

While there has been a vast amount of research on breast cancer in recent years, areas within this domain remain unexplored. For instance, there have been few attempts to marry an understanding of the social context in which breast cancer occurs with an understanding of subjective experiences of this condition. The purpose of this study was to explore women's experiences of embodiment after breast cancer, utilizing a phenomenological approach rooted in a feminist perspective. The focus of this article is upon (...) the changes to embodiment that are long‐term. Twelve women were interviewed on two occasions each and were asked to talk about changes to their bodies that occurred as a result of breast cancer. Three key themes were identified: (1) how it feels (e.g. sensation and breast loss); (2) managing appearances (e.g. wearing prostheses); and (3) treatments without end (e.g. menopause). The findings of this study show that women with breast cancer are a diverse group and that survivorship is a dynamic, life‐long process, which suggests that health professionals can play an important role in establishing interdisciplinary approaches to caring, beyond the conclusion of acute treatment. (shrink)

Palliative care names as one of its central aims to prevent and relieve suffering. Following the concept of “total pain”, which was first introduced by Cicely Saunders, PC not only focuses on the physical dimension of pain but also addresses the patient’s psychological, social, and spiritual suffering. However, the goal to relieve suffering can paradoxically lead to a taboo of suffering and imply adverse consequences. Two scenarios are presented: First, PC providers sometimes might fail their own ambitions. If all other (...) means prove ineffective terminal sedation can still be applied as a last resort, though. However, it may be asked whether sedating a dying patient comes close to eliminating suffering by eliminating the sufferer and hereby resembles physician-assisted suicide, or euthanasia. As an alternative, PC providers could continue treatment, even if it so far prove unsuccessful. In that case, either futility results or the patient might even suffer from the perpetuated, albeit fruitless interventions. Second, some patients possibly prefer to endure suffering instead of being relieved from it. Hence, they want to forgo the various bio-psycho-socio-spiritual interventions. PC providers’ efforts then lead to paradoxical consequences: Feeling harassed by PC, patients could suffer even more and not less. In both scenarios, suffering is placed under a taboo and is thereby conceptualised as not being tolerable in general. However, to consider suffering essentially unbearable might promote assisted dying not only on an individual but also on a societal level insofar as unbearable suffering is considered a criterion for euthanasia or PAS. (shrink)

: Using Judith Butler's notion that bodies are materialized via performances, "resignifying" disability involves a "democratizing contestation" of staircases because they exclude those in wheelchairs. Paleoanthropologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone shows how consistent bipedal locomotion, together with the knowledge that we will die (upon which mutuality is based), are ingredients of our pan-hominid speciation, not contingent constructions. As axiologically important as contestation is, it forecloses the possibility of achieving a mutuality with others, that is wonderfully possible.

Using Judith Butler's notion that bodies are materialized via performances, “resig-nifying” disability involves a “democratizing contestation” of staircases because they exclude those in wheelchairs. Paleoanthropologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone shows how consistent bipedal locomotion, together with the knowledge that we will die, are ingredients of our pan-hominid speciation, not contingent constructions. As axiologically important as contestation is, it forecloses the possibility of achieving a mutuality with others that is wonderfully possible.

This paper argues that luck egalitarianism, especially in the guise of equality of opportunity for welfare, is in tension with the ideal of fair equality of opportunity in three ways. First, equal opportunity for welfare is compatible with a caste system in employment that is inconsistent with open competition for positions. Second, luck egalitarianism does not support hiring on the basis of qualifications. Third, amending luck egalitarianism to repair this problem requires abandoning fair access to qualifications. Insofar as luck egalitarianism (...) cannot support fair equality of opportunity, it cannot do justice to the claims of the disabled. Indeed, in the absence of fair equality of opportunity, disabled people are likely to be marginalized. (shrink)

What does feminist disability studies contribute to feminist methods? Feminist disability scholars interweave life-writing about their experiences of disability or caring for a disabled person to challenge ableist stereotypes. As such, they foreground their own vulnerability to build disability identity and community. This style of life-writing, while essential, tends to calcify the dichotomy between the disabled and abled—a binary that the field of feminist disability studies aims to destabilise. Building on new work in feminist disability studies, I show how some (...) scholars use life-writing to cultivate an estranging sensitivity. This new sensitivity builds on prior feminist disability studies scholarship to estrange us from 1) the idea that disability is a cohesive identity and community, 2) that disability is always a socially desirable position, and 3) that allegiance to disability rights insulates us from ableist anxiety. By embracing the tension between solidifying and destabilising the meaning of disability, feminist disability scholars can leverage life-writing as a tool of resistance and thereby lessen the threat of conformity that life narratives tend to produce. (shrink)

This paper presents the early findings of research into the experiences of pain for those who live with chronic pain and engage in BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism), explored using a critical crip approach rooted in crip theory and feminist disability studies. The research took the form of a series of interviews with eight disabled people living with chronic pain who experience pain in their BDSM practices, developing a narrative of experiences. The majority of those (...) living with chronic pain, or who have diagnoses of chronic illnesses causing chronic pain, are women. Chronic pain is frequently assumed to be similar to acute pain; however, thinking through pain in terms of normativity and able-bodymindedness reveals the ableist structures that underpin normative attitudes towards pain and those who are in pain. Pain is understood as dehumanising—and thus the person living with chronic pain is understood as not human, abnormal, and disabled. The disabled body, the body in pain, is a horrifying object of abjection, and the non-disabled observer assumes that to be in pain is to suffer; therefore, living with chronic pain is understood as an ontological impossibility and must be stopped. BDSM is a series of practices forming a space in which the people living with chronic pain in this study are able to engage with their somatic experience in ways that do not expect normalcy, while being disabled and living with chronic pain gives them space to explore non-normative sexual practices. (shrink)

: Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between "sex" and "gender" and "impairment" and "disability" as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases (among others) that (...) form disabled women's oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)

Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between “sex” and “gender” and “impairment” and “disability” as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases that form disabled women's (...) oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the concept of normality in medical research and clinical practice is inextricable from the concept of ambiguity. I make this argument in the context of Edmund Pellegrino's call for a renewed reflection on medicine’s basic concepts and by drawing on work in critical disability studies concerning Deafness and body integrity identity disorder. If medical practitioners and philosophers of medicine wish to improve their understanding of the meaning of medicine as well as its concrete practice, (...) I contend that they should take seriously the import and centrality of ambiguity for biomedicine. (shrink)

This is the introduction to the inaugural issue of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability.

Drawing upon the practice of caregiving and the insights of feminist care ethics, I offer a phenomenology of caregiving through the work of Eva Feder Kittay and Emmanuel Lévinas. I argue that caregiving is a material dialectic of embodied response involving moments of leveling, attention, and interruption. In this light, the Levinasian opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity-based principles is belied in the experience of care. Contra much of response ethics’ and care ethics’ respective literatures, (...) this dialectic suggests that they are complementary in ways that productively illuminate themes of each. I conclude by suggesting that when response and care ethics are thought together through the experience of caregiving, such labors produce finite responsibility with infinite hope. (shrink)

British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning, and sex. This article considers the future of gender-related equality protections in relation to ‘decertification’—an imagined reform that would detach sex and gender from legal personhood. One criticism of decertification is that de-formalising gender membership would undermine equality law protections. This article explores how gender-based equality law could operate in conditions of decertification, drawing on legal thoughtways (...) developed for two other protected characteristics in equality law—religion and belief, and disability—to explore the legal responses and imaginaries that these two grounds make available. Religious equality law focuses on beliefs, communities, and practices, deemed to be stable, multivarious, and subject to deep personal commitment. Disability equality law focuses on embodied disadvantage, approached as social, relational, and fluctuating. While these two equality frameworks have considerable limitations, they offer legal thoughtways for gender oriented to both its hierarchies and its expression, including as disavowal. (shrink)

I argue that the lived experience of disabled people should be validated instead of a facile categorization. Thus far, a disabled sensibility is reduced to a categorical interpretation. Through my examination of a theoretical performance I illustrate how a disabled/able persona negates a disabled sensibility and allows an audience to experience the exotic disabled without examining their own `ableism'. Sobchack's and Clark's examinations demonstrate how both the techno-body and the cyberbody continue to devalue a disabled embodiment and sensibility. In the (...) final section of the article I explore how Deleuze's concept of `difference in itself' can free disabled people from the concepts of identity, hierarchy, representation and categorization that have been employed to devalue their embodiment and sensibility. Moreover, I believe that Deleuze's alternative theory of `difference in itself' can validate a disabled embodiment and sensibility. (shrink)

I show how much psychiatric disability is informed by trauma, marginalization, sexist norms, social inequalities, concepts of irrationality and normalcy, oppositional mind-body dualism, and mainstream moral values. Drawing on feminist discussion of physical disability, I present a feminist theory of psychiatric disability that serves to liberate not only those who are psychiatrically disabled but also the mind and moral consciousness restricted in their ranges of rational possibilities.

I show how much psychiatric disability is informed by trauma, marginalization, sexist norms, social inequalities, concepts of irrationality and normalcy, oppositional mind-body dualism, and mainstream moral values. Drawing on feminist discussion of physical disability, I present a feminist theory of psychiatric disability that serves to liberate not only those who are psychiatrically disabled but also the mind and moral consciousness restricted in their ranges of rational possibilities.

In western discourse the notion of the contagious, the unclean or the contaminated is never just a neutral descriptor but carries the weight of all that stands against—and paradoxically secures—the categories of normative ontology and epistemology. Set against the ideal closure and invulnerability of the self's “clean and proper body,” this paper investigates the condition of disability as a potentially contaminatory threat. But the given precarious psychic constitution of the subject, and the ontological insecurity of self performativity, can we reconfigure (...) vulnerability not as a term of weakness, but as the very possibility of becoming? (shrink)

This article inserts Aldous Huxley's Brave New World into a bioethical conversation about the value of old age and old people. Exploring literary treatments of bioethical questions can supplement conversations within bioethics proper, helping to reveal our existing assumptions and clear the way for more considered views; indeed, as Peter Swirski has argued, literary texts can serve as thought experiments that illuminate the ramifications of philosophical ideas. This essay examines the novel's representation of a society without old people in conjunction (...) with ideas about aging and life narratives put forward by philosophers and bioethicists such as Ezekiel Emanuel, Gilbert Meilaender, and Alasdair MacIntyre. While critics, and Huxley himself, view the Brave New World as dystopian primarily because of its depiction of a totalitarian society where art, truth, and meaning are sacrificed to pleasure and distraction and where the ruled are programmed not to question the values of their rulers, the novel also makes clear that the excision of old age has significant political, moral, and emotional costs. (shrink)

This article uses elements of autoethnography to theorize an in/formal support relationship between a friend with a physical disability, who uses attendant services, and me. Through thinking about our particular “frien-tendant” relationship, I find the common scholarly orientations toward “care” are inadequate. Starting from the conversations between feminist and disability perspectives on care, I build on previous work to further develop the theoretical framework of accessible care. Accessible care takes a critical, engaged approach that moves beyond understanding “accessibility” as merely (...) concrete solutions to create more inclusive forms of care. Care, in this context, is positioned as an unstable tension among competing definitions, including that it is a complex form of oppression. Accessible care draws on feminist disability perspectives and the feminist political ethic of care to build bridges in four areas: from daily experiences of disability and support to theoretical discussions; across feminist care research and disability perspectives; across divisions and anxieties within disability communities; and from the local to transnational applications. These bridges do not aim to resolve debates but allow us to travel back and forth between differing perspectives and demonstrate the tenuous possibility of accessible practices and concepts of care. (shrink)

Disability scholars have critiqued medical models that pathologize disability as an individual flaw that needs treatment, rehabilitation, and cure, favoring instead a social-constructionist approach that likens disability to other identity categories such as gender, race, class, and sexuality. However, the emphasis on social constructionism has left chronic illness and pain largely untheorized. This article argues that feminist disability studies must attend to the common, chronic gynecological condition endometriosis when theorizing pain. Endo is particularly important for FDS analysis because the highly (...) feminized and sexualized nature of endo pain is a major source of disability. Because medical treatments of endo enhance fertility rather than provide pain relief, those with endo must not only have access to medical services to manage their pain, but also demand better medical management of their pain as well as disability accommodations for their pain. Thus, I propose a pain-centric model of disability that politicizes pain through social-constructionist and medical models of disability by attending to the lived experiences of pain. (shrink)